Lindt's Lindor Milk comes in at the right price. The chocolate truly is "irresistibly smooth." The 18 Lindor Milk pieces melt in your mouth. They're addictive. Is Lindt diluting precious cocoa butter with vegetable fats? Hell yeah. Can you tell after Lindt's food scientists step in and adjust the recipe to cover up the cheapness? No.
If Alec Baldwin, Courtenay Cox, and Tom Hanks can be seen in public eating a Lindt bar, don't be ashamed. You can, too.

Avg
price/gram: USD 0.032

Cocoa %: 31

Size: 100g

Aaah, it must be great being
a multinational operation like Lindt. You export
products all over the world and can re-interpret ingredient
meanings based on the laws of the country you're exporting
to. I mean, in my parlance "m.s.g." means monosodium
glutamate, a preservative is something non-essential to the
food, usually unhealthy, added to increase its shelf life.
On food labels, m.s.g. can become "hydrolized vegetable
protein" and a preservative can show up as "E235" or some
similar meaningless designation.

Let's take Lindt's Lindor
Milk. Where I procured it, in Bangkok, with ingredient
labels designated for the Colombian and former Yugoslavian
markets, the ingredients are listed as: sugar,
vegetable fats (coconut, palm kernel, palm), cocoa butter,
whole milk powder, cocoa mass, lactose, skim milk powder,
butterfat, emulsifier (soya lecithin), barley malt extract,
and flavourings. Sounds relatively wholesome.
On Lindt Canada's web site, the ingredients appear as:
sugar, cocoa butter, coconut oil, milk ingredients,
cocoa mass, palm kernel oil, lactose, palm oil, soya
lecithin, barley malt extract, artificial flavour.
I learned that ingredients are listed from highest inclusion
to least. How can it be that the same bars, both made
in Switzerland, have different ingredient listings? In
my bar, there are more vegetable fats than cocoa butter, a
sure sign of an inferior chocolate. On the Canadian
label, cocoa butter is listed before the vegetable oils.
Butter fat shows up on the Colombian label, not on the
Canadian. 'Flavourings' in Bogota turn into 'artifical
flavour' in Toronto.

Do I think the bars are
exactly the same? Of course. They just don't
seem exactly the same. That's the whole idea behind marketing, is it not?

Lindt's Lindor range is a
real accomplishment in flavor and texture. The
Lindor White
and Lindor Dark
I reviewed were exquisite in taste and I reviewed
them as such. Were as I diligent about dissecting the
ingredients, I may have been tempted to rip Lindt a new one.
But as I discussed in my review of Lindt's
Dark Hazelnut, my
problems with Lindt stem from their incongruent status as
mainstream chocolatier and gourmet chocolate maker.
Lindt would like the public to believe they're in the
gourmet range, though price and lower quality ingredients
firmly put them in the mainstream. My gripe
with Lindt then is with their marketing, but how can I dock
Lindt points when all multinational corporations do
the same thing, glorifying mundane products with
superlatives?

Lindt's Lindor Milk comes in
at the right price. The chocolate truly is
"irresistibly smooth." The 18 Lindor Milk pieces
melt in your mouth. They're addictive. Is Lindt diluting precious cocoa butter with vegetable fats?
Hell yeah. Can you tell after Lindt's food scientists
step in and adjust the recipe to cover up the cheapness?
No. So what was it I was complaining about?

Lindt is like Absolut Vodka.
Marketing prowess put the brand name on everyone's lips.
Neither is the finest in its food category. Does it
matter? I'm sipping a vodka tonic right now made with
Absolut Mandarin. Lindor Milk t

itilates
the taste buds. If Alec Baldwin, Courtenay Cox, and
Tom Hanks can be seen in public eating a Lindt bar, don't be
ashamed. You can, too.